


A Little Death in the Afternoon

by SylvanWitch



Category: Black Sails
Genre: First Time, M/M, Prostitution, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-08-28 23:51:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16733016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: Of all the bars in all the world, the redcoats had to walk into this one...Fortunately, Flint and Vane chose a bordello, and one of the ladies of the house is more than happy to let them use her room to 'lie low'...or down, anyway.





	A Little Death in the Afternoon

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt: "I think we need to go."

“I think we need to go,” Flint said, eying the redcoats funneling into the bar.

 

“What’s the matter, Flint, getting old?  Time was you’d have enjoyed such a fight.”

 

“Time was we weren’t wanted fugitives,” Flint reminded Vane, rather needlessly.  Their faces were on broadsides everywhere, including pinned over the bar here in Bermuda, where they’d come incognito to raise funds for their ongoing effort to wrest Nassau permanently from the hands of the British.

 

They’d chosen a table in a shadowed corner with their backs to a wall and good sightlines, with easy access to the stairs up to the girls’ rooms above.  They’d done their recon before ordering their drinks and discovered that the upper gallery had easy egress if you didn’t mind landing in a manure pile.

 

“Out of the shit and into the shit,” Vane gruffed, but he had a wicked smirk on his face as he said it.

 

“I’ll go first,” Flint said, and Vane, for all his flippancy earlier, nodded grimly, eyes never leaving the captain of the guard, who was surveying the room with the look of a man who often found things he was seeking.

 

Dropping coins on the table, Flint rose and sidled toward the balustrade, where a lushly curved brunette was leaning seductively, one brown nipple peeking out above her corset. 

 

“Ready for a ride?” she purred, giving him a little shimmy that eased her corset down further.

 

Flint considered that he might once have enjoyed an hour or two in this beauty’s ample arms, but that was no longer true.  Care and rage had eaten away at his desire.  The last spark had been dowsed when Miranda was killed.

 

Still, he hooked an arm around the girl’s waist and leaned in to murmur, “Take me upstairs,” before nipping her earlobe.  She made a show of gasping and leaning away from him and then took him by the hand and led him up the stairs.  He didn’t look at Vane as he went, but he was sure he would make his own way without trouble.

 

The whore’s room was dim, heavy curtains blocking the afternoon sun.  Dust motes drifted lazily in a single, piercing beam that found its way through a bullet hole in the heavy drapery.

 

Flint raised an eyebrow.  
  
“Jealous husband,” she explained, giving him a flirtatious smile.  “We serve _all_ kinds.”

 

He didn’t think he was imagining the suggestion in her voice, and when Vane came through the door behind him a moment later, the woman gave them an elaborate wink, flounced into an embroidered chair set in such a way as to have a full view of the bed, and said, “Don’t let me stop you.  This one’s on me.  You two will be gorgeous together.”

Flint couldn’t say he’d never had the thought, but said thought had never emerged past some vague, late-night stirrings just before he sank into his troubled sleep. 

 

That Vane would ever have had even vague stirrings, well, that seemed to go without saying.

 

Which is why the look on his face was so…intriguing.

 

He was flushed, though that might have been from escaping the redcoats, whose heavy tread and heavier hands could be heard now in the rooms around them as they partook of the house’s many delights.

 

But he wouldn’t make eye contact with Flint, and he hadn’t yet denounced the girl for her assumptions, which might suggest to someone who knew Vane well that Vane was on uneven ground, uncertain of the right response.

 

Flint wouldn’t have imagined that Vane could be surprised by anything anymore, but the girl’s words had obviously thrown him.

 

With some surprise of his own, Flint realized he was growing aroused, a dangerous condition for any of several reasons, not the least of which was the fact that they were surrounded by the enemy.

 

Or that Vane would gut him like a fish if he so much as offered to approach him.

 

But once again, Vane surprised him, reaching out to lock the door and then moving to sit on the bed and begin to remove his boots.

 

“What are you doing?” Flint asked, and if his voice was huskier than usual, he would attribute that to common sense concern over their perilous state and not at all to the increasing tightness in his breeches.

 

Vane did look at him then, a challenging curl to the corner of his mouth.  “I should think that would be obvious.”

 

The girl giggled, and Flint let her be a diversion as he tried to gather his scattering composure.

 

“What’s your name?”

 

“Simone,” she said, wriggling a little more to free both breasts from their constraints.  With supreme disregard of her audience, she reached up to stroke one nipple to a pert peak.  Her eyes fluttered a little, but that was all the sign she gave of her own interest in the proceedings.

 

Behind him, Vane stood up, and Flint turned, as if confronting an approaching enemy, to see Vane working his shirt over his head. 

 

When Vane saw that he had Flint’s attention, he made a real show of it, using the tips of his fingers to caress his own chest and abdomen, pausing to tease the line of dark hair that arrowed below the waistband of his low-slung breeches, and then he traced the sharp cut of his pelvis until it disappeared out of view.

 

Flint’s mouth was dry, his lips open, and he found himself short of breath.  He swallowed painfully and tried to recover some sense of himself, but all he could see was Vane’s long fingers working at the lacings of his breeches and the impressive line of his hard cock about to be revealed.

 

But Vane stopped, raising an eyebrow in challenge, and said, “Well?”

 

Flint shook his head.  “I don’t understand.”

 

Vane’s laugh was like a hand around his cock, and Flint closed his eyes against it as against an assault. 

 

“When two men desire one another,” Vane began in a teasing, school-master’s voice, but Flint interrupted him, crossing the room in two strides to shut up him with a plundering kiss that stole the breath from them both.

 

If Vane minded being manhandled, he certainly didn’t indicate it, giving as good as he got.  Flint groaned at the heat of Vane’s mouth and the bruises he was pressing into Flint’s arms where he gripped him. 

 

It was brutal and perfect.

 

When Vane pulled away, Flint followed, wanting more, but Vane stopped him with a hand on his chest.

 

“Undress,” he ordered, and Flint, a man who had defied an empire and refused the rule of any man over him, did as he was told, making short work of boots and stockings and all the rest until he was naked as the day he was born, every scarred, pale inch of him revealed to Vane’s hungry gaze.

 

He was ashamed to find he was shaking and told himself it was unfulfilled desire.  Vane’s eyes didn’t give him a moment of peace, raking his body, lingering deliberately on his cock where it jutted from its nest of ruddy curls.  Vane climbed onto the bed backward, stretching out, making a show of it, the lean, vicious lines of his body, all that lethal grace a banquet for Flint’s eyes.

 

Vane finally dragged his eyes up to Flint’s and held his gaze as he began to stroke himself long and slowly.

 

Behind him, Simone took in a sharp breath, and Flint heard the creaking of the chair as she shifted position.

 

He didn’t look at her; he had eyes only for the spectacle laid out before him.

 

“Are you going to stand there all day, or are you going to climb up here and suck my cock?”

 

As a man who could measure the tonnage of a ship as it appeared over the curve of the world, Flint understood size.  He wasn’t sure he was up to the task that Vane suggested.  He wasn’t sure, now that they had come to it, about any of this.

 

Vane left off stroking to raise that hand to Flint, and Flint knew that even through the rope scars and calluses and cutlass slashes, he’d feel the heat of Vane’s cock inside of him with that mere touch.

 

Vane raised an eyebrow, saying, _What are you, some shrinking woman?_ without words.

 

Flint ignored his hand and climbed onto the bed, straddling Vane, bracketing his head with his two hands, lowering himself in a controlled plunge to taste his mouth again.

 

The motion brought their cocks in contact, and they groaned into each other’s mouths.  Flint took his time with this kiss, deepening it, making a point of holding Vane there beneath the punishment of his tongue, dipping his hips now and again to let him feel his cock, to tease him with friction.

 

Vane growled, grabbed him about the waist in a vice grip, and flipped him over, pinning him beneath his greater weight, levering a knee between his thighs and using it to nudge a groan out of him.

 

Flint tore his mouth away, panting, trying to get enough leverage to return Vane’s teasing thrusts.

 

But Vane had mastery of a certain kind of strategy, as much in bed as at sea, and Flint had to admit that it was effective in keeping him right where Vane wanted him.

 

Then Vane fastened his mouth around Flint’s neck, right where the great pack of muscle in his shoulder rose out to meet his neck, and Flint screamed, the kind that was sure to get the attention of others in the house.

 

Simone made a mewling nose from her corner, but Flint had ears only for Vane, who was pouring filth onto him, a steady string of anatomical improbabilities as he worked a hand between them and gripped their two cocks in his huge, hard hand, jacking them with ruthless efficiency until Flint was himself filling the air with bitten curses and struggling in earnest to set an even more punishing pace.

 

Vane relented only long enough to lift up in search of oil, the scents of sandalwood and lemon joining sweat and sex in the air, before the slick hand closed around his cock and jacked him once, twice, drawing his hips clear off the bed, chasing that annihilating sensation.

 

Then a finger moved back, sliding into the cleft, drawing a shiver from Flint.  Vane quested toward a place no one had touched since Thomas, and Flint froze, breath held, eyes staring but seeing nothing.

 

Vane’s finger circled the pucker, testing, dipped inside, and Flint swallowed around an obstruction made of sorrow and memories, and grunted, “No.”

 

To his credit, Vane simply shifted his attention, taking their two cocks in his hand again and stroking them slowly, drawing it out, paying attention to the swollen heads, which had pushed free of the foreskins.  He was panting, holding himself apart from Flint with one arm, their only point of contact now his hand on their cocks.

 

Flint looked down his body at the sight and then up at Vane, who had his eyes closed tightly, a furrow of concentration dividing his brow.  Flint suppressed a foolish urge to smooth it away, and then, as if Vane had heard the thought, his eyes opened, and the heat and the knowing in them, the animal simplicity of his lust, swept away the last of Flint’s reserve, and he felt the telltale tingling, the building pressure of it.

 

He said, “Vane,” and Vane nodded jerkily, gritting his teeth to hold off and hold off and hold off until Flint caught the top curl of the wave and plummeted into the trough, loosing a hoarse shout, toes curling, muscles in his neck cording as he threw his head back and came in a searing arc, splattering his chest and his chin.

 

Vane was there with him, rigid in his release, still spurting after Flint had finally emptied.

 

The space between their heated bodies stank of spend, and with every indrawn breath, Flint could feel their combined fluids on his body.  Vane, unfazed, dragged his spread fingers through the mess and grinned.

 

“That was good,” he said, bringing his wet fingers up to his mouth and sucking them down one by one, like he was tasting the last juice of a suckling pig.  “So is this.”

 

Somewhere off in the corner, Simone hiccupped through her own last act and then laughed, a delicious, low sound suggestive of all sorts of other things they might get up to together.

 

But there were heavy boot-treads in the halls, receding, and they had places to go and an empire to burn.

 

Counter to his expectations, there was no awkwardness.  Vane at last freed Flint from the cage of his powerful body by the simple expedient of pushing himself up and off the bed, and Flint sat up more slowly, letting the world reorient around him.

 

Simone tossed him a damp cloth scented with rosewater, and he cleaned the worst of their comingled mess from his chest and throat and chin.

 

He was considering looking for his breeches when Vane hove into view and muscled into the space between his thighs.

 

He didn’t touch Flint otherwise, just looked into his eyes.  The restless flame of speculation that was always there burned just as brightly now, but there was a gentler tenor to the curl of Vane’s lips when he said, “Dead man’s ease.”

 

Flint couldn’t help the tightening of his jaw, but he understood Vane’s terms:  The comfort a man is allowed to ask of another when he expects to soon be dead. 

 

In their lives, there was little chance of any other ending, and anyway, Flint didn’t feel lately like there was much to live for beyond burning the British empire to the ground and leaving the smoldering ruins for someone else to claim.

 

He was done with claims of any kind.  Now, he wanted vengeance and then rest of the forever kind.

 

“If we’re ever near to dying again, though…” Vane added, his smile a wicked, lovely thing.

 

Simone laughed and said, “Get out, the both of you.  I have to make a living, you know.”

 

So they went, dressing in silence, slipping out the door like two cats drawing shadows over themselves.  The bar was clear of redcoats, the world outside pearly with heat-shimmer, the ocean beyond the glowing white beach a jealous mistress who wouldn’t let them linger too long a-land.

 

With the same compulsion, their eyes sought the masts of the ships at anchor in the harbor.  With identical smiles, alive with a fierce, predatory joy, they stalked toward the beach and the blue road beyond, which would carry them to perdition one way or another.

**Author's Note:**

> As far as I know, I made up "dead man's ease," but if anyone's heard of a similar tradition, I'd be glad to hear of it.


End file.
